Contentions

Guess who is the world’s largest producer of liquid and gaseous hydrocarbon fuels (oil, natural gas, and natural gas liquids)? For years it has been Russia, which is deeply dependent on the production and export of such products (taxes and tariffs on them provide 40 percent of the government’s budget).

But this year, probably already, Russia will be overtaken by the United States, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal. U.S. oil production increased by more than a million barrels a day last year, the largest annual increase since oil production began in 1859. Russian oil production has been falling.

This has huge geopolitical implications and those implications all favor the United States. Imports of oil and gas are falling, down 15 and 32 percent respectively in the last five years, improving the balance of trade and reducing the political leverage of such countries as Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela.

Whether the environmentalists like it or not (and they don’t), the world runs on hydrocarbons and will for the foreseeable future. Having ever more abundant domestic supplies, with vast additional supplies in neighboring, and friendly, Canada and Mexico, is a strategic advantage that would be very hard to overestimate.